Most of us know we spend too much time on our phones. It’s led to a host of studies on the negative effects, and there are definitely repercussions to constantly peeking at your notifications and following those digital squirrels at every chance you get.

It is a decision I face daily. When my five-year-old daughter shows me her latest work of art, do I: A) talk to her about it and then stealthily slip it into the recycling bin, or B) talk to her about it, hang it on the wall or fridge, leave it there for a couple of years forgotten, and then stealthily slip it into the recycling bin? The mental load is real.

Social media stalking might be creepy and a waste of time, but most of us are guilty of it at one point or another. That's why, after our latest "How to hide your accidental 'like' on Instagram" post, we were intrigued by this even more efficient tip coming from one of our readers.

This week Instagram started rolling out a feature that shows your friends when you're currently using the app via a green indicator light.

Keeping up with your friends on all the various social networks you share can be an organisational pain. Now, however, Facebook is making this a tiny bit easier by allowing you to bring your Instagram contacts into Messenger, which also syncs your Instagram and Messenger conversations.

It’s late at night and you’re stalking an old friend’s Instagram. It’s all going well, until you accidentally “like” a photo from 42 weeks ago. I’ve been there; many of us have been there. The next time this happens to you, here’s a tip, recently shared by a Twitter user, in case of extreme, mortifying emergency.

Being online has never been more embarrassing. People are renting 10 minutes of time on private jets for the 'gram. The most innocuous and best-meaning of posts can spark outrage. You can't talk to someone on a plane without it becoming a viral story that leads to harassment. The president tweets.

People have always been able to reach out to the Instagram users they follow, and receive replies to their comments, by using the messaging feature baked into Instagram Stories. Thanks to a new questions sticker Instagram debuted, you now have a more formal (and fun) way to conduct interviews with your followers, fans and friends.

I tweet a good bit during the day, and almost always without fail my boyfriend is the first to throw a like on my posts, sometimes to a point that the like notification seems to come in the second I actually post my message.

This week Instagram made it a lot easier to add music to your Instagram stories. Facebook recently made a deal with a number of record labels, which means that tunes are available on Instagram as well.

I once briefly dated a guy whose entire Twitter feed was about biking. He spent his day posting links to cycling routes, talking about his bike, communicating with other biking enthusiasts, advocating for cyclist safety efforts, and putting up photos of cars obstructing bike paths. All of this is admirable, of course, but the problem was that I didn't have a bike, like to bike, or care very much about biking at all.

Instagram was experimenting with a new privacy feature. Using a test pool of small number of users, whenever an Instagram Story was captured in a screenshot of sent on to someone else in a direct message, the original poster was notified. But the company has backed away from deploying this feature, which is part of Snapchat, saying the experiment is over and you can go back to screenshooting and forwarding things to your heart's content.

When you're tagged in someone's Instagram Story, you've always received a notification in Instagram letting you know. This week the app added another way for you to interact with that mention: you can reshare it in your own story.

We all have that one friend who's insufferable on social media. If you're tired of seeing your Instagram feed cluttered with annoying memes, gloating status updates, or endless selfies, the solution seems obvious: Unfollow them. If only it were that simple.

Thanks to Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, more people becoming aware of "microtargeting" campaigns on social media. Used by pretty much every company on the internet, these are designed to change your behavior. They might be encouraging you to vote for a certain candidate or to buy certain products.

But what role do influencers - the celebrities of Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat - play in all of this?

All the cool services are getting data dumps - that little link you click somewhere in a settings menu that triggers the service to send you all the data it collects from you (and everything you've used it to do, theoretically).

As a lover of history, I'm enamoured by photos of the past. Important moments that have been preserved through light and lenses. Some are joyous. Some mournful.

I often trawl historic images on Instagram, because my nerdom knows no bounds. So I thought I would share some incredible photographs that have captured moments in tech history, from some of my favourite accounts.

Want your Instagram photo to get more likes? Create images with one dominant colour and preferably blue at that, suggests research from marketing and analytics firm Curalate.

Facebook's F8 conference took place over the past two days, allowing Mark Zuckerberg to get up on stage in a crew neck sweater and discuss what's happening with Facebook in the coming year. Even though user sentiment has been tarnished by privacy scandal after privacy scandal, Facebook's ridiculous amount of users are still keen to know what's coming from the multi-limbed social network.

We've got the big announcements right here including, uh, Facebook Dating?